Shout by Miguel A. Reina

Hillbilly Elegy 2020

[Netflix] Without knowing the book on which it's based, this doesn't seem the most successful portrait of white America that, like Amy Adams' character, falls over and over again in the same mistakes. Ron Howard builds a loud, histrionic movie based on a flimsy script, banal dialogue and messy construction. While Amy Adams is contagious of the histrionics of the film, Glenn Close manages to walk in the limit.

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@miguelreina Where did we get the idea this was supposed to be the "most successful portrait of white America"? I really don't understand your critique much at all.

@emjay2d Well, the book "Hillbilly Elegies" has as subtitle "A memoir of family and culture in crisis", referring to the values of Appalachian culture, which have their origin in European colonization. The writer Nancy Isenberg referred to them in her book "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America" (2017), in which she speaks of the "evacuation of Britain's human 'waste' from the country's slums as part of the English nobility's efforts to 'fertilize' the New World ". In a New York Magazine article, titled "No sympathy for Hillbilly," Franck Rich wrote that "maybe, they’ll keep voting against their own interests until the industrial poisons left unregulated by their favored politicians finish them off altogether."

In my opinion, the film fails in that description of this part of the United States (it would have been more interesting if it had gone beyond the simple family story of a drug addicted mother), and therefore I think that "this doesn't seem the most successful portrait of white America ".

@miguelreina <3 thanks for the clarification! I totally understand now!

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